Posted
by
timothy
on Tuesday March 29, 2011 @05:28PM
from the ask-again-later dept.

WrongSizeGlass writes "InformationWeek is reporting that Windows Phone 7 will overtake Apple's iPhone by 2015 according to IDC. IDC predicts 2015 will bring: Android 45.4%, WP7 & WinMobile 20.9%, iOS 15.3%, RIM 13.7%, Symbian 0.2%, and 'Others' 4.6%. These numbers would move WP7 into 2nd place and leave iOS in 3rd place with a slightly smaller piece of the smart phone pie than they current hold (15.7%). The author of the InformationWeek story isn't buying IDC's forecast, because of WP7's anemic sales to date and Microsoft's recent stumbles with its first two updates. I have to wonder if WP7 will still be Microsoft's smartphone OS in 2015 or if they'll have moved to WP8."

IDC tries to justify it by throwing the word "Nokia" around a lot, but honestly, Nokia will (at least IMHO) be lucky to remain in the smartphone business by 2015.

There's something else that screams "bullshit!" at IDC's predictions: while next quarter's marketshare stats (e.g. Canalys, ComScore, etc) may say differently, Microsoft's share of the mobile market is still dropping like mad. Even though WinMo 6.5 still has some mass to blow off, one would think that nearly 6 months of WP 7 would have at least slowed down the fall a little bit.

The final elephant in an already heavily pachyderm-populated room is Microsoft's utter silence on sales numbers. They almost always trumpet and trot out numbers, even if it's just channel-related. We all heard the big, bad 'two millionz0rz since launch!!!111' figure back in January, even though those were only channel shipments. Now, Microsoft's marketing department has nothing but the sound of crickets when it comes to mobile licensing sales (or even shipments).

Taken all together, it spells a whole lot of potential fail, and IDC needs to do a hell of a lot more than shout Nokia's name, like it were some sort of talisman that defies all logic.

IDC tries to justify it by throwing the word "Nokia" around a lot, but honestly, Nokia will (at least IMHO) be lucky to remain in the smartphone business by 2015.

Nah, more likely Nokia will eventually dominate again. Either with a Windows phone or Android. You can bet on it. They make arguably the best hardware of any phone manufacturer and that won't change, they just need to get their OS/software act together.

There is a chance that phones running Windows will at least be able to compete. Look at what Microsoft has done with the Xbox. If that fails Nokia can always fall back and release an Android phone which no doubt would quickly spring them back as the top

For the low end phones, that's true. I'm a Linux geek, and I'm in a love/hate relationship with my iPhone, but I purposefully didn't buy an n900 after seeing what a clunky, hugemongonormous piece of cheap plastic it was. If they had spent just 50 euro more per phone for a nice solid case and a thin form factor, I would have spent 100 euro more and been happily running UQM or Firefox on my phone.

What do you sell to the people wanting iPhones? Android devices? Or do they leave and go to a store that stocks iPhones? This fascinates me, because I suspect it may be a significant distortion to the US smartphone but I can't figure out how big. If you manage to sell them on Android, then now that Verizon has iPhone and T-Mobile is shortly going to go away, you'd expect to see a drop. Except Android devices having lower ticket prices might keep them in the game. Or maybe the "normals" do something else we

Well to be fair, and while personally I think it will be Android/iOS neck and neck with WP7 or WebOS third, the key to whether or not MSFT can pull this off will be bundle deals. if MSFT gets Nokia to put out a WinPhone with a kick ass GPU by holiday season AND manage to tie Halo in, like say having a Halo Phone Game that boosts your characters and earns achievements for the game at home? THEN they might be able to pull this off.

Because to be fair Windows 7 plays REAL nice with the X360. I've set up the Win 7/X360 combo for a couple of customers and it really is butt simple to make it a kick ass multimedia setup, so if they can "pull an Apple" and tie everything together, so say your WinPhone can watch anything you have at home by using the WinPC as a slingbox, while tying gaming between X360 and WinPhone together? Then yes I can see MSFT taking second place, especially if their successor to the X360 kicks ass.

But that is gonna be a hell of a big IF and will depend on the suits at MSFT not cocking things up. MSFT has a history of screwing the pooch and not "getting it", see Zune, Kin, Vista, etc, but the basic parts they need are there, the question is can they bundle them together in a smooth and easy to use package. While they do have a shot, and Android proves you can come along and change the game if you are in the right place with the right product, I frankly wouldn't bet the farm on it.

My personal prediction is thus: Android will burn enough folks with CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) that they won't be able to hold first, and Apple's traditionally high prices will make a nice opening for someone in the middle, but if HP can keep from screwing the pooch WebOS could be the one to take that slot, at the very least with their rep with businesses they could be the one to finish off RIM and take over the business phone market. So final call...Apple and Android, followed by either WebOS or WinPhone with Blackberry DOA.

The closest to "Chinese piece of crap Android device" I've experienced, other than the noname Android tablets, has been my Huawei S7. It's not a piece of crap, but it definitely has its issues and is proving to be mostly unsupported by the manufacturer. (Docking connector but no dock, somewhat buggy firmware, GPL noncompliance for a while, etc.)

However, while I've seen a lot of reports of people returning S7s due to being unhappy with them, it didn't sour them on Android. Most of them were saying, "Ditch

"The new alliance brings together Nokia's hardware capabilities and Windows Phone's differentiated platform. We expect the first devices to launch in 2012. By 2015, IDC expects Windows Phone to be number 2 operating system worldwide behind Android."

Not so fast...the author seems to base WP7's success on the success of Nokia, which is uncertain at best.

Yes, Nokia sells more cellphones than most other cellphone manufacturers COMBINED...however, a large majority of those sales are S40 devices, simple dumbphones that can't do much more than call and receive texts, but have a week plus battery life.

Nokia has, since mid-February, doubled-back on their future strategy. First, it was WP7 ONLY...then they were going to continue to release Symbian and Meego, now, Symbian is dead as of 2010.

It sounds to me like Nokia has no clue what they are going to do. At best, their explanation for the smartphone market has been murky; at worst, they still haven't addressed how they are going to make up the marketshare currently held by 600 million S40 dumbphones. Mostly people who do not want a dataplan or a smartphone. WP7 will not sweep into the low-end and take that market share. It's like Ford giving up making Fords, and deciding that they will only make high-end Lincolns to suit everyone.

I said it before, Samsung seems to have figured this out. They will use Bada on the low end, and Android on the high end. In this case, I would take a lot away from WP7's percentage, and bump up the "Others" category significantly.

Yes, Nokia sells more cellphones than most other cellphone manufacturers COMBINED...however, a large majority of those sales are S40 devices, simple dumbphones that can't do much more than call and receive texts, but have a week plus battery life.

But they do have a huge share of the smartphone market, it all fluctuates pretty quickly but they may still have the biggest share of that market.

It sounds to me like Nokia has no clue what they are going to do. At best, their explanation for the smartphone market has been murky; at worst, they still haven't addressed how they are going to make up the marketshare currently held by 600 million S40 dumbphones. Mostly people who do not want a dataplan or a smartphone. WP7 will not sweep into the low-end and take that market share.

They aren't discontinuing S40, that will continue to be the dumb-phone platform.

Sure they will... they go in, they don't back out and admit it's a failure unless it's horribly obvious. I wager somewhere between Zune (extremely low) and Xbox (in the game, but not a huge winner) in popularity, probably more like the Zune being fourth after Android, iOS and RIM in some order. See, the people that have dumbphones aren't interested in smart phones, and for those that want smart phones - particuarly a new generation of teens - WP7 is never going to get cool. RIM holds the business market, iOS has Apple's cult following, Android is a bit jack-of-all-trades and WP7 is... nowhere in particular.

Sure they will... they go in, they don't back out and admit it's a failure unless it's horribly obvious. I wager somewhere between Zune (extremely low) and Xbox (in the game, but not a huge winner) in popularity, probably more like the Zune being fourth after Android, iOS and RIM in some order.

Perhaps the GP comment

I have to wonder whether, in 2015, Microsoft will be in the phone software business at all.

is really more about questioning Microsoft's future, not just the future of Microsoft's phone business. Recently, they just killed Zune... not because they didn't want to stay in, but because they're tightening their belt. Microsoft is facing mounting pressure from the Googles, Apples and Facebooks of this world, who are hungry and execute well. It may come time at some point that they really are forced to focus on what they do best... business desktop software. This could mean the (forced) abandonment of WP software, Bing, etc.

They can't abandon WP7 THAT quickly, that would thoroughly trash the 18 month (random guess) dev cycle for win phones. I'd give them abandoning it in 2014 after a couple of crazed christmas attempts - but that still makes the article a joke.

Oh wait - that's the point - the article is not supposed to be right, it's supposed to be a recursive mindshare generator. "Look, WinPhone7 is good because some article says so!".

Don't forget Outlook/Exchange. I still think the biggest draw for MS is making a phone that works seamlessly with Exchange. Word/Excel/PP is nice and all, but staying in sync with mail, calendars, etc., in the office while traveling is where MS will get the most leverage. From what I can tell Exchange is nearly ubiquitous in large and mid-sized enterprises. In terms of providing lock-in, it's more powerful these days than Office.

See, the people that have dumbphones aren't interested in smart phones..

.. but will end up with one anyway, because they don't really cost all that much more to make. Android has already reduced the software cost to $0.00. Please don't tell me you're betting on electronics(!) staying expensive. Today's $600 widget is $50 tomorrow and free with every box of Count Chocula the day after that.

Dumbphones will go the way of word processing machines and PDAs. There just won't be a reason to make them, even if m

Dumbphones will go the way of word processing machines and PDAs. There just won't be a reason to make them, even if many people are satisfied by them, because the smartphone can serve both markets.

I would wholeheartedly agree with you, except for one thing: battery life. Unless that gets fixed, dumb phones will never go away. Most dumb phone users like the fact that their batteries last a week, and smartphones cannot fill that void at this time, nor do they appear likely to any time in the next few years. I'm betting that dumb phones, albeit with more features and possibly even running a bare bones version of Android under the hood, will continue for the next few years.

The problem with "cult followings" is that they are by definition limited in broader appeal. They also tend to be rather mutable. The world is littered with ideas and products that once had "cult followings".

Apple's place in the history of handheld consumer electronics is certainly secure and quite rightly celebrated, but ongoing success is based on a complex set of variables. It is a mistake to believe that there will be no non-Apple innovation. If bringing a unique and in

A typical P/E for companies in general is 16, the tech sector tends to have unreasonably high P/E ratios, if you actually look at the fundamentals, MS is a much better buy than Apple or Google, it just isn't buzz worthy anymore. Tech shares sell as much on ones dreams as anything about the company, which is why MS is selling for so much less despite being in a stronger position, they are dull as dirt.

And at a certain point traders decide that a stock is only worth a certain amount of money and won't pay any

No, microsoft only won once: DOS. After that, they just used that marketshare alongside some really shady business practices to push windows as the #1 OS. After they became filthily rich, their strategy has been fairly simple... they push OEM manufacturers to bundle windoze with new computers, so that average joe considers windoze part of the computer, the default, and doesn't even consider anything else, they keep certain missfeatures, bugs, and some awful design issues in order to keep the huge fix-windows industry alive (overcrowded IT departments, anti virus/malware/spyware/whateverware, and the shitload of motherfuckers that make a living out of charging joe six pack 50 bucks to remove all the crapware he installed while trying to download porn), sliding money under the table for some high-level managers at fortune 500 companies, etc, etc.

That's it. Everything m$ has done after that (that wasn't directly related to windows on x86) has failed.

Microsoft has never had any kind of success in any new market. This will not be an exception.

People is afraid to migrate, afraid to change, therefore they are still relevant in the x86 OSs business. Anything else is brand new and fair game for everyone, and m$ just can't compete on that, competition hasn't ever been one of microsoft's strongest points.

With the (possible) exception of Multiplan/Excel, Microsoft used their large revenue stream to buy in or partner with others to produce the products on your list. These products had existing analogues outside Microsoft - Word was based on the work done at Xerox PARC by Charles Simonyi and Butler Lampson in 1974; Microsoft employed Simonyi in 1981 - SQL Server originally used the codebase from Sybase SQL Server and initially had almost no input from Microsoft. Exchange traces its linage back via Microsoft Mail to the Network Courier and InterMail products, both of which Microsoft purchased from others.

Microsoft's main insight with Office was to bundle word-processor, spreadsheet and presentation programs together that could exchange data within Windows for about the same price as a single program from their competitors. This and the simple fact that all of the bundled programs used the same (Windows) printer driver made them a lot of sales.

Your post's parent is essentially correct - Microsoft have not done well where they cannot use the Windows lock-in.

Microsoft is not known for strong initial offerings. The original IE was awful. The original Windows was unusable. They tend to stay in and fight, and sometimes win.

I find this statement telling. Because, a few (three?) years ago, I believe it would have been something like:

"They stay in and fight, and always win in the end."

Once, Microsoft was perceived as invincible. Once, if Microsoft entered your market you either tried to get them to buy you or else just gnawed your own leg off first (e.g. Novell and NetWare) because Resistance Is Useless.

Now, Microsoft is not perceived as invincible. The world has indeed changed...

First IBM seemed invincible with their mainframes.
Then DEC seemed invincible with their minicomputers.
Then Apple and Commodore seemed invincible with their microcomputers.
The IBM seemed invincible with THEIR microcomputer.
Then Microsoft seemed invincible with their operating system and applications.
Then Yahoo seemed invincible with their web portal.
Then Google seemed invincible with their search engine.
Then Myspace seemed invincible with their social networking site.
Then Apple seemed invincible with

They are so precise they even give the percentages down to the first decimal place... they're that good! I'd be impressed if they even got the ordinal rankings right over that stretch of time (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc), even moreso if they could ballpark the percentages (30-ish %), but then again i suppose that's why I don't have people paying me to predict things.

How can they possibly even attempt to make this sort of prediction and be taken seriously? In four years time there may be a totally new, undreamt of technology that has made mobile phones redundant. There may be a new vendor on the market who has come from nowhere with a proper Linux-based O/S and taken over everything. Who knows?

Is it a seriously slow news day today or something? It's not April 1st for another 48 1/2 hours, so they're not playing us for April Fools.

A true computer geek never throws anything away. I've got PCMCIA Token Ring cards, ISDN cards with no drivers and enough Ethernet cables to reach to the Moon. I can't swing a dead cat around my head in our apartment without hitting some useless, outdated technology. But I could never throw any of that away. That's what landed Hans Reiser in the the slammer:: he told the cops that he threw away the back seat from his car. The cop smartly said, computer geeks never throw anything away. Case closed.

Microsoft has one major advantage that they have used again and again. It's not their money, their technology but rather last mover advantage. They know how make bundles of technology introduced while other players have dominate market shares and take away those shares. They did it search, in word processing, spreadsheets, servers and they are working their way on gaming systems and others.

They have the time and the money to get it right and the money to get out there. People are only locked into phones for

With up around 70% of the market is Google. With Yahoo at less than 20% and Bing at less than 10%. Microsoft has bought themselves in as the search engine for Yahoo and are still less then 25% of the market. How exactly did they beat the dominate technology company in search?

They have the time and the money to get it right and the money to get out there.

Time works against Microsoft as their engineering culture sinks further and further into dysfunctionality. Who cares about trying to achieve great things, much less hard slogging debugging work, when midyear review has no correlation between engineering success and career advancement? When rank and file employees are forced into a zero sum mutual backstabbing game trying to avoid that dreaded A/10? When the top management does the opposite of inspire by example?

Android will always suffer (in a VERY GOOD way) from being open source

Google and the hardware vendors will always benefit from Android being selectively open source, but it's a black hole of open source that detracts from platforms that are far more open, diverse, compatible, and don't have so many elements of the OS controlled by a single organization that happily treats the open source community as second class citizens, allowing devices to ship with admitted rush job software they won't give to the AOSP

Every damn time that MS makes any significant move in a market they do not currently dominate, I am bombarded with people presuming the eventual *domination* of MS (whether they like it or not) to the exclusion of all others. MS has really only done that *twice*, desktop OS and Office suite, and *that's it*. They have not 'done it' in search and servers. They came closer in game consoles, closer than either search or server space, but they have not acheived near-monopoly status anywhere else or even become #1 in any of these markets.

MS is simply not the beast it used to be and/or the competitive landscape is a bit more competent. In OS space the only viable competitor at the time dominance was established was Apple, which MS successfully outmaneuvered in volume by managing to get cloning companies going and getting hardware companies to destroy each others' margins to deliver more volume to MS. My opinion is the office market was lost by simple business and/or technical inadequacies depending on which company you are talking about. Apple has learned how to be price competitive if it *has* to, while at the same time successfully marketing themselves so they don't have to. Google is going much further than MS did in enabling 'cloning' whilst mostly keeping integration with Google services very much intact.

...if the IDC "study" takes into account the effect of the AT&T - T-Mobile merger. Because if that occurs and there isn't a deluge of customers from T-Mobile to Sprint as a result, then the iPhone would be available for... well, basically everyone except for Sprint customers in the USA, and you'd have to think that could only help the iPhone's market share.

The assumption that the author seems to have made is that most phones will be smart phone in three years.

If that holds true, and Nokia holds on to a 20% market share the "study" seems like reasonable speculation.

Of course the assumption has a lot of issues, but it is not really assuming that iOS loses any share in the mobile phone industry, just that the mobile phone industry and smart phone industry will merge. If that happens, and that is a big IF, and Android is at over 40% other Linux phones at 20%, an

We are predicting four years out on a category of product that scarcely existed four years ago? And we say a product that has been out for six months should be in second place in four years? I am confident that the predictions are right, after all that website gives us three significant digits saying Windows 7 will have 20.9% of the market-share.

Need we ask what the pundits predicted for the iphone looking 4 years out this early in it's life? Sure seems to me that in the technology arena that 4 years is WAY too early to make big predictions, heck in 4 years MS could be bankrupt and Apple could have been split up over antitrust issues.

Oh well, anything to fill the pages in between the ads of you magazine...

I don't pay a lot of attention to IDC's forecasts.
In mid 2010 IDC gave an authoritative forecast of 7.6M tablets sold worldwide for 2010. http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS22345010 [idc.com]
They completely missed that. Why should they be any more accurate on the Windows phone (or anything else for that matter?)

Well, maybe your post would be more powerful if you actually listed the number of tablets sold instead of leaving us googling for it, wondering if it was lower or higher and by how much. Yeah, I googled for it, took a few minutes since I needed the correct terms to hit upon it. 20 million tablets sold in 2010.

As soon as Microsoft puts Kinect-like functionality in a phone or tablet, Android, iOS and others will have nothing to counter it..

WP7 was a great attempt and was very slick and new which briefly made iOS and Android look old news at the time. But it was too little too late into a saturated smartphone market.

Kinect sold ten million in a few months - outselling all ipods iphones and ipads and being extremely impressive for any new technology release. But we're all still so obsessed over shiny smartphones that we're ignoring Microsoft's meteoric sucess with Kinect and failing to talk about the obvious next move from MS. Kinect is, quite frankly, is a real revolutionary change in interfaces. Something which it owns and it's competitors don't. Multi-touch was more an evolutionary gimmick wrapped in masterful marketting hyperbole. It's cute, but touch screens have been around a long time and are stupendously overrated: ultimate your hands are in the way of the display.

This is all if Microsoft actually gets it's shit together of course, something it's competitors have been doing better the last 9-10 years. If it does, it suddenly makes Windows mobile getting more market share entirely plausible.

One things for sure, gaming on smartphones is underwhelming - Apple sure isn't doing it right. Microsoft has proven sucess with gaming.

How does motion control work for portable electronics? Does proud Johnny Doe stop walking, put the phone down in the middle of the sidewalk, take 10 paces, and then start waving his arms before screaming across to his phone?

Most people here are focusing on what this prediction claims (great market share for WP7 in four years), but can anybody explain why they're making this prediction?

I understand that in various industries, long-term projections are a valuable tool for suppliers, investors, and more. But in a business with 6-month product cycles, what's the value in predicting so far out? Who uses this information? How? When you consider that each and every cycle brings uncertain results, there's a huge accumulation of uncertainty when you're predicting what will happen 7 or 8 cycles from now.

From having worked with similar data and consulted companies that purchase similar data, I can tell you that no one in the business seriously relies on IDC's (and Datamonitor, iSuppli, DisplaySearch, etc.'s) precise long-range forecasts at face value. However, these forecasts are still developed for several reasons.

1) Firms have to take a long-term view with regards to certain investments. I don't know this particular business well-enough, but e.g. firms may have to make go-no-go decisions on expanding

I'm not an MS basher, so go ahead and bash me. I love Outlook and use all the features. I wish MS would get its act together and make a really good phone OS. Can any phone out there sync as nicely as an MS based phone to Outlook? They all have programs and adapters, but do any of them simply plug in a sync everything? If they do, then I think MS is going to have a hard time. If MS still owns the sync, I would think that many like me will easily adopt a Win Mobile 8 phone that syncs well and works well

So, they're expecting Android to have a 45.4% market share in 2015. Not 45.3, not 45.5. That means that they think that their predictions have a relative error of less than 0.3% over a period of 4 years. OR, it means that they are a market research company that doesn't employ anyone who ever took a statistics 101 course.

Further, Microsoft has stumbled badly with the first two system updates for its smartphone platform. First by delaying it for nearly two months, and second by bungling the actual delivery of the updates. Things are not going so smoothly for Microsoft. Heck, WP7 champion Joe Belfiore actually wrote a public apology to its WP7 customers about the whole update debacle.

This is the platform IDC thinks is going to own 20.9% of the market in four years?

Looking at it purely from tools, I'd rather develop for WP7 than iPhone or Android. WP7 has a proper visual layout designer, while iPhone is tied to Xcode and ObjectiveC and Android has the awful XML layout system, in all of its buggy and inconsistent glory. (try putting a ListView in a ScrollView sometime!)

On the other hand, the niceness of the tools is offset by the fucking shameful cripplings in the library. The nastiest thing I can think of in this regard is lack of sockets, which makes a huge porti